


Hurt

by virtueofvice



Category: The Originals (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-17
Updated: 2014-11-17
Packaged: 2018-02-25 17:58:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 826
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2630933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/virtueofvice/pseuds/virtueofvice
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Elijah needs to feel something, and he chooses pain.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hurt

**Author's Note:**

> _What have I become_  
>  _My sweetest friend_  
>  _Everyone I know goes away_  
>  _In the end_  
>  _And you could have it all_  
>  _My empire of dirt_  
>  _I will let you down_  
>  _I will make you hurt_  
>     
> -Johnny Cash/Trent Reznor, "Hurt"

Eiljah is the wise brother. The patient brother. The noble one. The one in control. At least, it's always seemed that way. There's a deep, dark well snarling its emptiness from the bottom of his being, a void so black with regrets and buried memories that he sometimes wishes - like the werewolves currently nipping at his heels - he could throw back his head and howl. 

He dismisses Marcel with a wave of his hand, eyes fixed studiously on the glint of cufflinks and fine linen as he rolls up his sleeves; ignoring the way the younger vampire's catlike eyes bore into his back, deliberately unaware of Gia's annoyed huff. No one likes to be kept behind after class. The thought pulls one side of his mouth into a smirk, the shadow of stubble along his jaw lending the expression a rakish turn. 

"Hit me." He commands, and the fledgling steps into a stance that is sloppy, but workable. She has been trying, teaching herself in his absence. He feels a dull and distant twinge of self-recrimination, a mental reproof for leaving this sharp-fanged lamb alone in a wood full of wolves. She tries, again; and fails, he blocks her wild strike with the effortless languor of the truly bored. Another smirk, hidden as his back turns, and he gleams from beneath brooding brows, a crown prince in exile. 

"As a devout feminist I refuse to say that you hit like a girl. Let's try this again, shall we?"

She rails against his benevolent contempt, resentful and yet treading on glass, offering by instinct the respect to which he is entitled - by virtue of age and experience, and a certain viciousness that marks him like a tattoo no matter how well-polished the gentlemanly exterior. He senses her anger and feels his skin prickle, banter paving the way to opportunity. He has not been himself lately; the endlessly spiraling disaster that is the Mikaelson family life weighing heavy on his conscience and scratching the glossy veneer of his practiced personality. 

"Fighting is rhythm. There is a music, there is a meter, there is a pattern. Let that rhythm beat within you. Again."

Gia became a vampire willingly. Marcel had, at last, learned patience and the art of deliberation. He chose his new disciples cautiously, from the ranks of humans who had tired of the mortal coil. The woman before him had knowingly turned her back on life in exchange for only the promise of something more, and that recklessness shows tellingly in the movement of her body. She hits without regard for her physical form, throwing the full force of her preternatural strength and speed behind the blows. She does not care if she injures herself, if in doing so she also injures her opponent. He pictures her as a bullet, a missile, hurtling heedlessly toward her target with no thought spared for the inevitability of her own destruction. A woman with nothing left to lose. 

It pleases him. He wants her to strike him; wants to use the pain to transform himself again, back into the good brother, the noble one. To push down all the pieces of himself that are spilling over, pummeling the darkness back inside its cage and locking it tight. A vampire newly risen, even her best is not much against his body, which may as well have been carved from stone - but it is enough. It is enough to hurt, and he feels his blood heat, pulse throbbing in time with the cadence of their spar. Instead of driving the darkness back again, he feels it uncoil in his belly; that old familiar hunger yearning to stretch upward, draw back his throat, and howl. 

There is a certain thrill in immortality, and he tastes it now, as her slim hand closes around his heart. She has the long fingers of a musician, punching sharp beneath his ribcage and curling, with the delicacy of a surgeon, around his beating heart. He feels her fingertips flutter against slick red flesh, absurdly intimate even transmuted as a white-hot lance of agony. Her lips part, watching him cope with the reality of having another person wrist-deep in his chest, realizing it is not only the purity of pain that she sees. She glances down at his blood against her skin, the crisp white linen of his shirt, and licks her lips. His eyes blaze, waiting for her to make her choice. 

"Elijah?" Hayley's voice is like ice water, and isn't that strange, because it seems only yesterday that it sounded like the herald of dawn. She walks into the room, bearing proud as befitting the Queen of the Wolves who would not have her. And he withdraws, and puts Gia in a box on a high shelf and locks it, because it's obvious now that she would teach him how to feel again, when what he'd wanted was for her to teach him how to forget.


End file.
